


your nothings come, like stones

by inkandcayenne



Category: True Detective
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-25
Updated: 2014-07-25
Packaged: 2018-02-10 09:16:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2019537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkandcayenne/pseuds/inkandcayenne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lucy is a halfway house located somewhere on the road to sanity and normalcy. He should stop lingering there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	your nothings come, like stones

**Author's Note:**

> Previously posted on Tumblr. Comments are much appreciated!

i. 

He’s not back in that neck of the woods until about a year after Ledoux.  The case is fairly straightforward, probably just another angry ex-boyfriend, but that’s where inquiries lead.  It’s not the same bar—not even the same town, if you could call it a town—but it’s the same girl: bleached hair, bright smile, tired eyes.  

She’s with a client, so he doesn’t interrupt; just sends over a drink, that syrupy five-liquor abomination she likes so much. Slips the bartender an extra twenty and tells him to get the lady whatever she wants.  He gets a sidelong look in return— _the lady_ , sure, whatever.

It’s another two hours before she’s unattended and he’s done grilling KA’s—the deceased’s ex’s father’s old cellmate’s girlfriend, something like that, the endless fucking game of telephone that eats up the first week of any case—and there’s no reason to stay.  But he’s been increasingly conscious lately of the deafening silence of his apartment, the way the blank pale nothingness of that space rushes in at his ears like waves.  Conscious of the fact that there are only two people left on earth who ever look him in the eye and they’re occupied right now, on one of their obnoxious “date nights” they keep having ever since Marty was allowed to move back in.  But this has been his life for as far back as he can remember ( _nothing he can remember before that, no, certainly not, no lazy Sundays three to a bed, no warm bubble baths and toddler giggles, that never happened_ ) and there’s no reason, no  _fucking_ reason, it should be bothering him now.  

At North Shore they would’ve called this “progress,” as if being fucking annoyed somehow automatically counts as progress, as if anything that cuts through the gray-green haze—anger, anguish, frustration, dissatisfaction, loneliness—is somehow a step in the right direction.  Well, fuck that.  Rust has felt awful and he’s felt nothing, and between the two he’ll take nothing every time.  And this—the low buzz of neon lights over the bar, the mosquito hum of voices, the yellow-orange smell of beer in the air—it feels like nothing. So he stays.

After two hours she glides over, tilts her head and flashes that lazy half-grin he remembers.  She’s worked her way through his money, he can tell.  “You’re spoiling me, sugar,” she says, not slurring much at all.  “Watch out or I’ll get used to it.”

It’s a mask she wears, that flirtatious warmth; he remembers it from the first night, before he flashed his badge and her face closed down like a mausoleum door.  “You remember me at all?” he mutters around his cigarette as he lights it.

“Hell yeah I remember you.  Murder police.”  She slides into the booth across from him.  “I saw you on TV.  Y’all got the guy.”

He remembers cameras and reporters as he was easing the child’s body onto the coroner’s gurney. He nods, looks away, fiddling with his club soda.  Her smile is disarming.  “Yeah, well, you helped.”  He flicks the tip of his cigarette into a black plastic ashtray.  

“Me?”

“What you said about the place near Spanish Lake.  Turns out the victim was stayin’ there.  Led us to the guy.”  It’s not true—it had led them to the church and the church had been a dead end; it was Rianne Olivier that led them there, and Rust had figured that one out all by his fucking self while his partner was off getting his dick wet.  Still, she looks happy when he says it, and it’s not often people look happy when they talk to Rust.  “So, I figured.  Drink’s the least I could do.”

She reaches across the table, steals one of his cigarettes.  “I missed you.”  

“Bullshit.”

“I did.  It was nice just to talk to somebody.  Without, you know.”

He knows.  She just wants to have a conversation without sex; he wonders what it would be like to have one without murder.

Someone calls her name across the bar.  Her head whips around, her hair like sunflowers nodding in a sharp breeze.  She reminds him of Marty’s daughters, though Marty would sock him one if he ever said so.  She turns to face him, apologetically.  “I gotta—”

“Yeah.”  He stuffs his cigarettes and lighter into his pockets without looking at her, starts to rise.  

She leans across the table before he can, though, and presses her lips against his cheek.  She smells like violets.  “Come see me sometime?”

He doesn’t think he will.

ii. 

A month later he’s treated to a half-hour-long monologue in the car about how Marty saved his own marriage through the power of Patience and Honesty (and Jesus, too, but Rust figures he knows better than to say so by this point) and this is what a relationship is, right?  Shutting the fuck up while the other person says some stupid shit because their ignorant ass is the last thing you have in this world?  But goddamn if it don’t make him feel like his skin is trying to come off his bones some days. 

“You don’t get credit for fixing what you already broke,” he finally replies.

He gets that characteristic scowl in return.  “What the fuck would you know about it?”

When he’s back in his truck he makes it almost all the way back to the apartment, to its empty cool white solitude like a snow globe with the flakes all settled.  He gets as far as his street before he jams on the brakes and abruptly reverses.  It’s only an hour and a half to Vermillion Parish, after all.

It’s a Tuesday and early, so there’s no one occupying her attention.  He buys her a drink and, later, a cheeseburger and fries.  She talks about the other girls, some drama about someone borrowing someone else’s boots without asking permission and then breaking the heel.  He doesn’t really listen, just leans his head back against the window and lets her voice fall over him, like a rain of pebbles.

iii. 

The problem with Maggie is that she doesn’t know any other women than the ones she works with, and the problem with doctors and nurses and physical therapists is that they all want to fucking  _fix_ you.  This one’s a nutritionist.  

Marty gestures with his fork to the carrots on Rust’s plate.  “Probably the only vegetable he’ll ingest this month.”

“Potatoes are a vegetable,” he says mildly, and takes a sardonic amusement in the horror that crosses her face.  The human body can’t function properly without fresh vegetables, she says, because she is middle-class woman having a nice dinner with other middle-class people and probably can’t imagine she’s sharing a table with someone who sometimes didn’t see a fresh vegetable for six months at a time.  She starts in on the benefits of vegetarianism; Maggie watches him closely, waiting for the inevitable explosion.  Marty just looks amused, in the manner of a man whose marriage is a competition and who takes a queer sort of triumph in his wife’s failure to domesticate one of Louisiana’s last true wild men.  After three minutes Rust calls his date an “evolutionary error” and the evening ends early.

By the time he gets to the bar down in Erath, Lucy is stumbling out the front door and it’s starting to rain.  He offers her a ride back to her place.  They sit in the car for awhile, smoking.  They argue about what to put on the radio until the rain stops.  She invites him to come in.  He doesn’t.

iv. 

The third time, she’s getting trouble from a rough john and he flashes his badge.  She invites him in again and this time he doesn’t refuse.  After that he doesn’t stand on ceremony, just shows up at her door with wine coolers and takeout.  Hot wings.  He tells her about the vegetarian.  She laughs, licks her fingers.

Afterwards they sit on her bed, shoes off, legs stretched out, nestled in between the piles of stuffed animals that she drags from one hotel to the next every time she’s kicked out for hooking.  They watch football.  He hates football but likes the way her hands move when she’s talking about it, like snow flurries.  

v. 

He doesn’t ask, but she tells him anyway.  She’s from Tennessee; she misses the autumn trees, the way it looked like the sky was burning orange and yellow.  She has two brothers.  She talks about one of them; she doesn’t talk about her parents.  She was a cheerleader. Her favorite bird is the pelican.

Her words are heavy stones falling into the bottom of a well. He’ll hear the echoes for years.

vi. 

He doesn’t want to admit it, but that stupid commendation Marty fought for helped. It’s not like he’s getting asked out to beers with the boys (thank Christ for small favors), but the worst of the grousing and eyerolling has stopped. He is shifting under their gazes, mutating into something acceptable—a necessary annoyance, like a summer rainstorm. “You’re easier to put up with these days. I’d like to think I’m a civilizing influence,” Marty says with a lazy smile, and Rust only  _thinks_ about punching him in the nose. Times like this the image of his North Shore therapist’s smug, complacent face rushes back with violent suddenness, that maddeningly steady voice assuring him that with patience and hard work he, too, could one day rejoin the human race.  _Is this enough for you, motherfucker_.

God knows he doesn’t want to still be that fragile delicate broken thing he was when he first came here, that twig skeleton filled with crumbling, dried-out leaves, a flammable, whiskey-soaked husk. Sure as hell doesn’t want to be Crash anymore, either—a blistering, vibrating burnt-rubber live wire. But he’s not sure he wants this—or, at least, he’s not sure he’s ready for it.

Lucy is a halfway house located somewhere on the road to sanity and normalcy. He should stop lingering there.

vii. 

He buys pills from her that he doesn’t always take. Lines them up on the windowsill where the first hint of dawn comes in. If he’s awake to see it (he’s always awake to see it) the sun peers through the muddy orange plastic and lights the bottles up like a row of altar candles.

Once, when she’s out of pills and short on cash, she talks him into purchasing her services.  He goes along with it mostly out of an idle curiosity as to whether everything’s still in working order.  “Twenty to go down,” she says, the words dripping slow and stoned from her strawberry-kiwi mouth.  He gives her $50, threads his fingers through her hair and thinks again of sunflowers bent over like supplicants, nodding lazily in the breeze. He doesn’t let her touch him anywhere else.  He closes his eyes.

viii.

“You got kids?” she asks once over Chinese takeout and cheap beer.  She’s better with chopsticks than he would have thought.  

“No,” he says.  It’s a conversation he’s tired of having, and he wants there to be one person in the world he doesn’t have to have it with.

ix. 

Five blind dates in ten weeks.  Sometimes he thinks Maggie hates him.  (Sometimes he worries about the opposite.)  “We just don’t think you should be alone,” Marty says, as if he and Maggie are some kind of unit and not a broken promise held together with Scotch tape; as if Rust isn’t alone, right now, next to him, in this fucking car.

When Lucy speaks she says nothing, which is almost but not precisely like being alone. Her voice is a drift of autumn leaves, cool and damp and soft, burying him. He wraps the memory of its weight around him like a blanket when he returns to his own bed.

x. 

Sleep comes easier since they closed the Lange case. Not easy, but two hours most nights, even three, albeit in fits and starts. Tired-but-awake is so familiar he doesn’t notice it anymore, like the sensation of his own tongue in his mouth.

The regularities of this post-Crash life ground him in spite of the uneven, jagged motions of rest and wakefulness, like a clock that ticks steadily even as it’s being hurled out a window. The cup of coffee Marty always stops for at 3 p.m., no matter what they’re doing or where they are. Ironing his meager wardrobe every Saturday morning. A terrible blind date every other weekend, followed by a drive to Erath where he turns the radio too loud and pretends that he’s not an embarrassment to Marty and Maggie and that his time with Lucy isn’t some sort of balm, or penance, for his awkward, cringing attempts at being a person.

Everything’s moving in its familiar patterns, headlights from the motel parking lot splashing across the window, grainy figures navigating the TV screen, smoke curling up from the ashtray, the occasional but steady ebb and flow of beer sloshing as she raises and lowers the bottle. And then a sudden awareness of his surroundings, of everything askew just so, parallel where it was perpendicular seemingly moments before. His head is pillowed on that ugly orange sweatshirt she wears during football games and he’s nestled among stuffed toys on all sides, like the time he fell asleep next to Sophia’s crib.

“Hey, Murder Police”—she’s never called him anything else—”guess you dozed off there.” She leans across him to steal a cigarette from his pack on the nightstand and it burns where her skin brushes against his. “What happened to ‘I don’t sleep’?”

xi. 

After he starts seeing Laurie he doesn’t go back down there for five weeks, which is how long it takes for them to have their first fight. Their fight is about his constant picking of fights and her subsequent refusal to rise to the bait; in short, about that inability to communicate in normal human sentences that seems to be the source of most of his interpersonal conflict. He storms out, or tries to; since North Shore it’s kind of felt like all his joints don’t quite meet up and he can’t really storm anywhere, just sort of delicately amble. And this is good, right? He has a girlfriend that he fights with, like regular people do. He sleeps three hours a night and he drinks cough syrup only when he has a cough and he doesn’t wrap his hands around things like he’s always about to drop them anymore. The mask is shifting into place. Maybe once it’s complete people will leave him the fuck alone.

He’s not sure what he wants when he turns his truck south and west—another votive-candle bottle of sleep, or to nestle on her bed like an animal going to ground, or just the sound of her voice rolling like warm, smooth stones on a Mediterranean beach. But she’s gone. Three weeks now, the guy at the desk says. No one knows where. He peers through the window. Bare walls, white sheets.

xii. 

Maisie’s eleven and it’s probably the last year she’ll go trick-or-treating. She wants to go with her friends, but Marty’s not hearing it. His whole Paternal Authority thing has gotten worse since Ledoux. Rust thinks he’d wrap those girls up in cotton wool and put them in a display case if he could.  He’s not sure how he let Marty talk him into coming along for this shit.

Maisie’s hair is in two ponytails like miniature volcanoes sprouting out of the top of her head. “What the fuck is she supposed to be?” Rust mutters out of the corner of his mouth.

“Fuck if I know,” Marty replies. “Some girl singer. From a group of girl singers.”

He lights a cigarette and hangs back, watching Maisie march down the street before them, keeping her stupid dad and his weirdo friend ten paces back, swinging her orange plastic pumpkin and tottering on sneakers with three-inch platforms. Walking along that strange liminal space between childhood and adulthood. He thinks about the commodification of women and improbable shoes.

The sun’s just setting over the trees, which are lush and verdant still. It seems wrong, somehow, for autumn, but everywhere he’s ever lived was stuck in some sort of stasis, too cold or too hot for changing leaves. He likes the idea of them, of the promise of youth giving way to death in a glorious redgold blaze. “You never seen anything like it,” she’d said one night—“up in the mountains, it’s like the sky’s on fire, like the whole world’s burnin’ down.” “Sounds nice,” he’d answered, “I always did like the idea of conflagration”—they were both a little stoned, that night.

It’s the last time he’ll think of her, at least that he’s aware of.


End file.
